Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday March 19, 2009 @02:20PM
from the they're-small-and-quiet-the-end dept.

omnilynx writes "With capacity on the rise and prices falling, solid state drives are finally starting to compete with traditional hard drives. However, there are still several issues to take into account when moving to an SSD, not to mention choosing between a widening array of offerings. Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech does a better job than anyone could expect detailing those issues (especially those related to performance) and reviewing the new offerings in the SSD arena. Intel's X25 series comes out on top for sheer speed, but OCZ makes a surprise turnaround with its Vertex drive giving perhaps the best value."

The real solution is going to be when the OS (which knows what that data really means, which is file and which is metadata and which is cache and backing store) and not the flash controller does all the wear leveling and block erasing, bypassing the flash controller as much as possible. Which is going to require new APIs and interfaces.